Compassionate Steel: The memoirs of Wylie Gibbs, surgeon, grazier and Federal politician

By Wylie Gibbs

Wylie Gibbs relates truly fascinating vignettes from his fifty years as a surgeon in Australia, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Fiji.

One incident relates to his treatment of the late Prime Minister Harold Holt, forty-eight hours before his disappearance. His discussion of this episode, illuminated by his close relationship with Mr Holt,&nb

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barrallier Books Pty Ltd
• Release date: Aug 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780648074588

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Compassionate Steel

Wylie Gibbs

To Tracey and Murat Yurtbilir who made this book possible and Tracey’s mother Eileen who made happiness possible

First published in 2017 by Barrallier Books Pty Ltd,

trading as Echo Books

Registered Office: 35-37 Gordon Avenue, West Geelong, Victoria 3220, Australia.

www.echobooks.com.au

Copyright ©

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry.

Creator: Gibbs, Wylie (Wylie Talbot), 1922– author.

Title: Compassionate steel : the memoirs of Wylie Gibbs, surgeon, grazier and federal politician/Wylie Gibbs.

ISBN: 9780648074588 (ebook:epub)

Subjects: Gibbs, Wylie (Wylie Talbot), 1922-,

Gibbs, Wylie (Wylie Talbot), 1922---Travel.

Surgeons--Australia--Biography. Politicians--Australia--Biography

Book layout and design by Peter Gamble, Canberra.

www.echobooks.com.au

Contents

Introduction

Death Of A Prime Minister

The Way Things Were

Early Influences

Student Life

Rotating Internship

Flying And Cutting In The Northern Territory

Religio Medici

Thursday Island

Postgraduate England

Hammersmith Hospital

Ship’s Surgeon Bundaberg

Ipswich

Senior Consultant Ipswich

Canberra And Sydney

Back To Queensland

Fiji

England En Route to

Saudi Arabia

Pause

Tabuk Again

Homeward Bound

England Khamis Mushayt England

Oz Again-With Some Clearing Up In Britain

The Dying Fire

Swan Song

Introduction

When in 1951 I was presented to the late King George VI, I was honoured but perplexed and bothered. I was working at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at the time and my wards contained many people with lung cancer. When presented, his Majesty asked what I did. I replied:

‘I’m a trainee surgeon, Your Majesty. I think it something worthwhile.’

The King nodded and then, with a slight curl to the lip said:

‘Especially if you know what you’re doing.’

On driving away from Buckingham Palace I said:

‘The King’s got lung cancer!’

This was doubly strange. I hadn’t heard that he had that horrible disease and yet my workplace was always abuzz with the medical problems of the good and great. No rumour had escaped. Did the king know something was wrong but hadn’t been told? We all knew of his other smoking-related problems such as serious circulatory problems with his legs, treated with sympathectomy.

He didn’t die for nearly twelve months later of the disease, but it surely would have been detected by XRay.

The point of this was that I didn’t need an X Ray: I knew it from his appearance.

I claim no pre-eminence here. Any good doctor, surrounded with such cases would recognise another.

The point of all this? Too much reliance is placed today on the result of tests and clinical acumen is in the dust bin of old-style medicine. This is a huge mistake. In this book I mention two cases where this was necessary for diagnosis; one, sadly too late: my dear friend Jimmy Johnson died of a heart attack two days after a normal electrocardiogram purported to show a normal heart.

We’re learning much, much more about the underlying processes of life and how this may be used to help allay suffering. Despite this, there are countless volumes yet to be learned and sweeping aside all older ideas is a mistake.

‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried

Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.’

I hope you will enjoy some of the experiences, mostly surgical, that I had during a life spent loving the privilege of participating in the so-called healing art.

Death Of A Prime Minister

‘The PM would like to see you in his office.’

The Government Whip raised his eyebrows quizzically as he poked his head into my office. I’d gone to Canberra on a Monday night to do some research. At a previous summons the PM had asked me to accompany him to Viet Nam.

‘Thanks Bill.’ I said and with a look of wild surmise I clattered down the stairs in the Whip’s wake.

Harold’s face was drawn: he was obviously in pain. The problem, he said, was with his Left shoulder, any movement was excruciating. As he stripped to the waist, he mentioned that he’d had trouble with his other shoulder some time previously but it was now pain-free.

I examined him. He was slightly stooped. There were signs of wear and tear in his Right shoulder, but its movements were full and pain-free. Not so his Left. All movements were severely restricted and extremely painful: the features of a frozen shoulder.

Pain in the Left shoulder can be a sign of coronary artery disease, so I carefully listened in to his chest. There were no ominous moist sounds at the lung bases. Reassured, I manipulated the painful entity a la John Jefferies, about whom more anon. I reassured him, but wrote a note for him to have an electrocardiogram on the following morning. This proved to be normal and his pain next day, though still present, had improved considerably. By Friday morning he was much better, but moving his shoulder still caused some pain and its movements were still limited. He was his normal cheery self.

Forty-eight hours later he was dead.

There’s always a background in such events, of course, the most significant one quite possibly, no, very probably, being a phone call on the fateful Sunday morning from that execrable example of all that’s rotten in politics, Billy McMahon. Billy later denied it, no doubt to escape opprobrium, but he was a well-known liar and Harold’s housekeeper made the definite affirmation that it was indeed he who’d called. His voice: high pitched and slightly squeaky, was absolutely unmistakeable.

Positively lusting after his job, this deformed character, waging a skilful campaign against Harold, had already won over many unworthy MPs by promises of preferment if he recruited the necessary numbers. Dudley Irwin, another Government Whip, who’d sent a memo to Harold advising him of an allegedly rising swell against him proudly told me himself that, if/when Billy won the day he’d be given a ministry.

One of Billy’s planks was Harold’s performance at Question Time. He did have a point: instead of concise, witty rejoinders, as in Bob Menzies’ day, Harold would ramble on and on—and on. At least twice I’d pleaded with him to keep it sharp and brief and no doubt others had too, to no avail.

That phone call was probably Billy telling Harold that he had the numbers at last. The latter, knowing the former only too well, would probably have assumed that he was lying, but it wouldn’t exactly have made his day.

He was also having serious problems with Black Jack MacEwen a tough operator to say the least, leader of the Country Party coalition with Harold’s Liberals.

Last but not least, his wife, Zara, for all her qualities an unlikely life’s partner for one so clean cut as Harold, was having an affair with Jeff Bate, Member for Tilba Tilba Cheese, a likeable if slightly raffish character.

Harold himself had, understandably, developed a friendship with a lady, the nature and extent of which nobody, the lady herself excepted, can possibly know. She was present with a small party on Portsea beach when he arrived to take his final, fatal steps into extremely turbulent water.

There are only three credible possibilities. Ridiculous speculation about submarines and the like are, of course, unworthy of any consideration.

1. He deliberately committed suicide.

When I attended him on the Friday morning I saw no signs of depression. I was sensitive to his moods and, after all, I was dealing with the Prime Minister. Moreover, he wasn’t a coward.

Most suicides like to communicate finally in some way—usually by means of a letter.

Had he decided to do away with himself, surely he would at least have given some hints—perhaps a farewell sign of some kind—to his lady friend, actually on the beach?

But he had a frozen shoulder! Any movement would have been painful and restricted in amplitude, a combination that must at the very least have hampered his battle against that treacherous, raging sea.

It’s very important to realise in this context that Harold loved pitting himself against the elements, taking pride in the risks he took in the water, perhaps to bolster his amour propre. A good, honest but insufficiently strong Prime Minister, he was strong, resolute and resourceful in literally troubled waters. Not strong enough either, perhaps, in those of a domestic kind.

2. My view, for what it’s worth, is that, upset—to say the least—by Billy’s phone call, together with all of his political and domestic problems: the possibility of a broken marriage, whoever was responsible, would inevitably have had profound consequences: more so then than now. He assessed that perilous flood and decided to give it a go, his strong subconscious, mentioned later, telling him that it didn’t matter too much if he didn’t make it.

3. There’s a third possibility. I had a very dear friend whom I’d visited during a Parliamentary break. Giving me a classical history of coronary heart disease, I urged him to have an ECG at once. This showed no abnormality at all. Relief! All clear! Excepting that he was found dead under a favourite tree a few days later. ECGs aren’t totally reliable. Could this have been Harold’s problem? A normal ECG with an underlying, fatal cardiac problem? He wasn’t wearing a wet suit. One imagines that a sudden chill could cause spasm of a diseased Coronary artery with consequent clotting of blood within it.

Who knows? He certainly had no chest signs of a coronary occlusion when I examined him. I strongly favour the second alternative. However that may be, poor Harold visited the bottom of the monstrous world to the detriment of Australia and, incidentally, unimportantly, my political future. Unimportantly? Well, not very importantly, from every point of view. Hardly chuffed at the time, I was infinitely better off out of the dirty game that’s politics. I can’t guarantee that my conscience would have remained clear had I not lost my seat. That loss took me back to my profession full-time, after an interval which allowed me to recover myself after working hard in a busy, rambling electorate and at the same time practising my profession whenever I had any spare moments. Call it hubris; call it presumption, I’d always, naively, thought that I’d do more good if I were able to apply whatever knowledge and skills I might have on a wider field.

One evening Harold asked me if I’d like to accompany him to Viet Nam as his medical advisor, but the main reason for my presence would, I realised, be to try to pick up the pieces if the Viet Cong expressed disapproval of his presence in a practical way.

I was at his side throughout our entire time there, excepting for one occasion when he had discussions with General Westmoreland. That name resonated. There’s no doubt that, like Henry V’s cousin he’d have liked more men to expend on the battlefield. The end result of the General’s enterprise was decidedly less successful than Henry’s at Agincourt.

Unlike Pooh Bahs of today, we flew to Singapore on a regular scheduled flight, though Harold, his secretary, General Wilton and two off-siders, three bureaucrats, the Head of the Commonwealth Police and I were screened off from the madding crowd. The policeman, there to stave off any assassination attempt on Harold, confided that this was an impossible task if the VC really meant business.

From Singapore we flew to Saigon in an RAAF Viscount. Ton Son Nut Airport was an experience, littered with the detritus of crashed and generally shot up planes. We often flew hither and thither from here across Viet Nam in American helicopters, witnessing signs of the fighting: artillery duels in particular. It gave one a strange feeling when the gunners unshipped their weapons after take-off. The only casualty there was Harold’s secretary, who collapsed on the tarmac, whether from fright or heat couldn’t be established.

A planeload of journalists had followed us, but we only saw them occasionally. Once or twice I had drinks with them at the Hotel Caravelle. We went up on to the roof one evening to witness a napalm attack.

Before we left Oz I’d prepared a couple of pages of health advice for everybody, press included.

Naturally I met the local panjandra, including General Cao Ky, whom I liked very much. He was a quiet, thoughtful, brave man who flew missions in his prop-driven fighter against enemy jets. At our first grand dinner it was pleasing to discover that birds’ nest soup, despite its origins, was a true delicacy. As I sat, quietly eating, Harold suddenly called out, for all to hear:

‘Just look at how Wylie’s handling his chop sticks!’

With all eyes suddenly upon me, those implements went completely awry, food falling from my nerveless grasp!

Looking around to admire the magnificent venue, one couldn’t help noticing that the cornice had been shattered by intense gunfire, the result, I was told, of the CIA’s assassination of Emperor Bao Dai who didn’t fit in with the US’ scheme of things. How many others were murdered at the same time?

It was quite exciting travelling to these events, hurtling along in a convoy, hemmed in by motorcycle police, sirens wailing! We always drove with windows almost closed. The VC had a nasty habit of lobbing grenades through open car windows. There can’t have been any air-conditioned cars in Viet Nam at that time as the interiors were always hot.

When Harold (I always called him sir) was having his conference with Westmoreland it was arranged for me to inspect Saigon’s leading hospital.

Naturally I immediately made my way up to the operating theatres. There I found a recently graduated doctor grappling with a chest wound, courtesy the VC. These were common because the VC had the nasty habit of throwing grenades into restaurants. This youngster had the chest well and truly open and was dealing quite well, if very slowly, with the bleeding. A badly damaged lung awaited his attention. Naturally I wasn’t at all pleased that a senior surgeon hadn’t got off his fundament to try to save a life, but was assured that that was the practice there, inherited from French precedent. True or false? I don’t know.

I was also taken—this time with Harold—to an American hospital and saw how wonderful was the treatment. One man had had his femoral artery severed by a VC bullet: a rapidly fatal event as one can well imagine. He’d instantly been picked up by medics in their helicopter who staunched the bleeding, transfused and resuscitated him and had him in the operating theatre twelve minutes after his wounding.

The medics who performed these humanitarian tasks were the truly magnificent heroes of that war. Completely dauntless, they’d land in the midst of most intense fire, coolly resuscitating victims whilst all hell let loose at them.

Throughout this expedition I dosed everyone with the drug Enterovioform, supposed to ward off food infections, to keep everyone on deck. It did appear to do so, as the only case of Delhi belly was a major, the General’s ADC, who declined with thanks—well, he did decline. The only trifling problem here is that this drug was subsequently shown to cause SMON, subacute myelo-optic atrophy, AKA blindness. Sending the PM blind would indeed have been an achievement!

There were many memorable experiences: seeing vast rubber plantations shattered by gunfire; lush, rolling countryside seen from the air; the grand Mekong river; several patients, nursed and fed by relatives and forced to share a bed in a rural hospital and the looks of dire hatred on the faces of the poor deluded inhabitants of a Communist village I’d trundled through in a little two-man tank, in the middle of Soekano’s rabid attempt to take the whole of Borneo by force. I noted with displeasure that the Australian-made corrugated so-called galvanised iron used to buttress the trenches was already quite rusty. Few experiences were medical. Another was staying in the house the King of Siam had built for Anna.

Oh, yes: a bureaucrat did cut his head by hitting it on a tank stand at the Australian Army cantonment. Harold, too, cut himself shaving before some function in Thailand. I hadn’t come prepared for that and had to settle for toilet paper as a haemostatic agent.

He and I were now on friendly terms. Once, later, in Australia, when dining together, he ordered a Martini as a pre-luncheon drink. I regard that beverage as a poison, but what can one do when dining with the PM? I had the same. Because the attendant, like time’s winged chariot, was hurrying near, Harold ordered another but I drew the line. As we conversed, he had his glass in his hand, occasionally gesturing with it to make a point. Suddenly his hand shook so much that he spilled much of his drink.

‘There you are, you see, Wylie’ he said, ‘I have a very powerful subconscious. Something said to me: Harold, you shouldn’t be having that second Martini! I’m sure that’s why it happened’. This just possibly provides a clue to his regrettable end.

As an aside, for some obscure reason, Martinis are supposed to be the jolly old thing. I had the pleasure of dining at the lodge with Bob Menzies on a couple of occasions. Each time we had to drink the wretched things which Bob insisted on mixing personally, in imitation, I’ve been told, of Winston Churchill. Folly, thy name is Man!

My career ended when the contest for leadership between jolly Jack Gorton and Paul Hasluck took place. During the campaign I was constantly plagued by urgings, in one case pleading, from many of Gorton’s supporters, Malcolm Fraser included, but my answer was always the same: Paul Hasluck is the better man. My wife tells me that I was an idiot: I should have agreed to support Gorton but vote for Hasluck. I’m glad I didn’t. Earth’s dregs control politics. That’s why it’s in such a dreadful state.

Cutting a longish story short, when a redistribution of electoral boundaries took place prior to the subsequent elections, I found myself landed with the Labour voting sections of my two adjacent Tory colleagues. They received my choicest parts. I was kindly allocated their Labour rumps. They’d ostentatiously supported Gorton.

Some years previously, before the Viet Nam War, shocked by the atrocities the Communists committed as they began their putsch South and poor little Laos, in the line of advance, having terribly few medical amenities, I—quite stupidly—thought that surgical help there might bolster the country a little against the forces of night; at the worst, provide some humanitarian aid. I sought help from the Federal Australian Government, Paul Hasluck, then Foreign Minister to wit. His refusal was a kindly one. The contact begat thoughts that I should enter Federal politics.

For my sins, I’d been a member of the State Executive of the Tory party for some years and, though far from impressed by most of the characters I’d met, a move to Canberra seemed logical.

I applied for the Brisbane bay-side electorate of Bowman, with neither time nor inclination to lobby anyone: Party head-quarters, local branches or individuals. I quite simply hate and despise lobbying to the nth degree. Decisions of this, or, indeed, of any significant kind, should be made solely on factual data, entirely objectively. Emotionalism is at odds with reason.

My feelings sprang partly from natural diffidence (the hate part) and partly because, as a member of selection committees, I’d receive visits to my professional rooms from candidates about to appear before my committee who’d suddenly developed symptoms demanding my urgent attention. One of these later became a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland. A few others, including that judge, succeeded in becoming members of parliament. I never attended selection meetings when one of those creeps consulted me (that’s the despising bit).

Came my selection night, a speech had to be made before the committee. In the very middle of my spiel there was an urgent phone call, relayed to the room, the only time in my experience that such a meeting had been interrupted by a phone call. It was for me. There’d been an affray: two people, knifed in the abdomen were in shock and bleeding internally. I gave the registrar who’d phoned instructions for treatment, pending my arrival, audience wide eyed as my instructions were technical: better entertainment than E.R!

Speech unfinished, I raced up the road to Ipswich. One of the victims needed splenectomy, that organ having almost been severed by a knife-thrust.

That was the second case: the blood transfusion was keeping up with the bleeding.

The other had copiously bleeding incised wounds of the liver. Suturing this isn’t easy and demands the utmost care: it’s very friable and sutures readily cut out. The trick is to insert interlocking sutures parallel to the wound and then—with the utmost care—suture the wound together across the parallel sutures, easier said than done, especially with blood gushing copiously everywhere. A strong will to self-control is vital: don’t panic!

I couldn’t have been the favoured candidate: nobody phoned. Surprised, I read about my success in the paper the following morning. How Beelzebub must have laughed!

You see, there’d been a curious incident whilst organizing my campaign. I was deeply depressed, just having lost a most dearly loved one, incidentally on a Friday evening. Next morning, I had to perform three major operations: removal of stones from a patient’s common bile duct; a gastrectomy and a mastectomy for cancer, all of which required strictest attention to detail. To say I didn’t much feel like working on that day puts it mildly. However, the operations went smoothly and the intense concentration probably had some therapeutic value.

Soon afterward, at night—the only time available to me—I was irrigating some Lucerne (alfalfa) on my farm, Queensland, as usual being in drought. I pumped from a waterhole adjacent to a road along which high tension electricity power lines had recently been strung. The aluminium pipes were long and as I manoeuvred one of them, I felt a metallic scraping.

Ah1 I thought I must have hit the power line…Strange! I’m still alive!!

But was it the power line?

Indifferent as to whether or not I died, I tried it again. It was indeed the power line. The only reason, in my view, why I was still extant, apart from a miracle, was that I was wearing wellies and the ground was very dry.

Was it a sign that I’d make a mark in politics? Of course it wasn’t. Always very agnostic about such things, at the time I nevertheless thought that such an odd deliverance might have been of significance.

When campaigning, I reluctantly forced myself to knock on doors. On the other hand, I didn’t mind spruiking on street corners. Helpers came forward; time-servers too, looking for an opportunity to gain a toehold on the greasy pole, I met some fine people who, like me, suffered from the delusion that we lived in a democracy and that their work was for the betterment of their country. I had that airy-fairy notion progressively crushed out of me, but this tale isn’t about politics.

With two girls at an expensive boarding school and other children to be educated, I had to continue practicing my profession. In those days a Federal Australian parliamentary salary wasn’t sufficient to keep the financial nose above water, especially as I had to relinquish my consultant post. After my electoral success, my brother, later Chief Justice of Australia’s High Court, phoned not only to congratulate me, but also to remind me that I now had to resign from what was laughingly called an office of profit under the crown. Four half days away from my practice, one unpaid and what pay there was pretty abysmal! Profit?

I entered Canberra in style. Sir Robert Menzies was giving out the prizes at my girls’ school and offered me a lift in his aircraft: not the huge, expensive behemoths present-day pollies swan around in but a twin piston-engined Convair.

Having resigned my Ipswich post and with the private practice there sold, the Wickham Terrace enterprise had to provide the necessary supplementary funds. Parliamentary sessions lasted from Tuesday afternoon to Friday morning, leaving Mondays, weekends—when there wasn’t a football match or budgerigar society meeting in the electorate—and Friday afternoons free—and of course there were many Parliamentary recesses. Postoperative care, especially with less serious cases, could mostly be left with the referring doctor if I trusted him. For really major surgery the Whip was always cooperative, allowing me whatever leave was necessary. Enough work rolled in to keep the finances just afloat.

A practice—free, of course, because the patients, remember, were either politicians or their hangers-on—rapidly grew in Parliament House, to the extent that I was allocated a consulting room in the building, the old one, nearer to Lake Burleigh Griffin: an easy walk over pleasant lawns, before the move to more exalted accommodation had been made. It was quite busy, with a constant stream of ailments, real and imaginary, to care for. A few of these were noteworthy, the runner-up being a senior cabinet minister who, out of the blue, developed terminal cancer. I hadn’t the heart to tell him outright, saying instead that he had a serious problem and should consult his doctor on his return to Perth, his home town.

A couple of patients who, influential and still around the ridges must be nameless, were neurotic to a degree.

Many politicians proved to be as thick as two planks. For instance, KL, a patient and the senator chosen to chair a committee to decide whether or not Oz should be metricated was nice enough but wouldn’t have known the difference between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Well chosen! Apart from neurotic aches and pains, probably the most common ailment was middle ear infection, the result of flying when the individual had a cold. Oft times I was simply being exploited but I didn’t mind, any more than I’ve ever worried about so-called kerbside consultations. That’s what I’m here for! Incidentally, though the more moderate Labour members consulted me, I never had the pleasure of treating the more rabid left wingers. Matters eased in my second term when the Labour Party also returned a doctor.

One of my great pleasures was a happy acquaintanceship with dear old Arthur Caldwell, Leader of the Opposition, one of the very few totally honest politicians; a good and kind man. There were tales when Whitlam was bullying his way to the top that Arthur would go to Bob Menzies to pour out his heart. We met because we often took the same car home at night. Unlike most in his position, he never made a questionable shilling out of it and wasn’t at all well off after he’d retired (parliamentary pensions hadn’t become so outrageously inflated). It was my pleasure, when later associated with the drug companies, to obtain some expensive medicines for Mrs. Caldwell. You’re in Heaven, Arthur, happy that few if any of your colleagues are there too.

Bob Menzies retired at the end of my first term at Canberra. I was very sorry to see him go. He was a politician through and through but managed to be a very nice man at the same time. Harold Holt was his successor and though I regretted the change, nobody ever being able to take Bob’s place, I became very fond of him as I got to know him better. As the Treasurer, he’d asked me to analyse health schemes in other countries and make recommendations, resulting in my first overseas trip as an MP. I strongly doubt if any of my recommendations still see the light of day.

The Way Things Were

When I was born more than ninety years ago, the practice of medicine was primitive compared with its far greater sophistication today, not, of course, realised at the time. There was, indeed, a vast body of knowledge about how the body worked but nobody could do much about it.

Physicians have always regarded themselves as a breed superior to surgeons, but, in the period under discussion, surgeons had far more curative procedures at their disposal. Physicians in the early Twentieth Century had effective treatments for a mere handful of complaints: they could ease coughs; somewhat prolong the lives of sufferers from heart failure with digitalis, discovered almost three hundred years previously; could treat syphilis—common then—by injecting vast quantities of water containing an arsenical preparation and use sedatives and pain killers. There were also a few metals: gold for rheumatoid arthritis a very old treatment indeed, witness Chaucer’s aside about the doctor on the Canterbury pilgrimage:

‘For gold in physick is a cordiall, therefore he loved gold in speciall.’

Mercury